Finishing Beanz: diary 04

(Warning - another overly geeky post!)

It was a pretty productive this last weekend gone, I managed to find some time to crack into my 2nd go at doing some colour correction. My first attempt went ok, it was mostly involving rolling up my sleeves and getting stuck into trying to work out how to use a software application called "Color" which is part of Apple's Final Cut Studio.


The newest version of Color has fixed a couple of issues that I encountered on my first attempt to import a Beanz scene into the application from Final Cut. Previously if you had an edited sequence which contained still images, such as overlaid type created in Photoshop for title credits, the imported sequence would appear all messed up in Colors timeline, making it almost impossible to select clips for adjustment. So with that fixed we are now cooking with gas!

Working on Beanz sc10. The colour correction process is particularly important for this project i think, Working with Color to help define the overall visual style, and to make the most of the available image data in a complementary way.

One of the things I should point out for any newbie colour graders working with this software for the first time is to bare in mind that Final Cut and Color display their Colours on screen quite differently. ...James says after image grading a whole scene only to bring it back into FCP with all the colours wrong - gah!

Basically, Color conforms to the Mac's system wide Gamma setting (which by default is 1.8) whereas Final Cut, apparently, overrides this and displays its colours at 2.2. However, FCP7 does assume that footage being imported into it is at gamma 1.8 by default. Confusing? yes, yes it is!

Long story short, I have found Color to be a pretty powerful grading tool when you have the will and give it the time to get to know it, and can look past its prehistoric caveman looking interface. I was able to write out a dvd-ready mpeg-4 file which looks correct when viewed on a standard Quicktime movie player, but it remains to be seen how it looks on an actual dvd playing on a random TV screen. I'm sure if I don't succeed I will moan about it here on a future post :)

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